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Taking their inspiration from philosophy, human sciences have learnt that collecting people's life history is fundamental to understand and clarify situations and the «lebenswelt» of human beings. Life histories and the narrations of self provide the human scientist a deeper wiew and comprehension of the causes and reasons that other methodologies, such as observation, cannot get. Everyone is a storyteller of himself and such narrations of self enable us to know the invisible and the inner life of all our similars. Starting from this convinction Duccio Demetrio sees writing as a fundamental exercise that everyone should do in order to get a better knowledge of himself. An exercise that is also and mainly a pleasure and a way to «play seriously» with our own identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism communication, especially since the digital turn, has registered several attempts to open to new forms of multilingualism. For instance, the traditional multilingual experience offered by guided tours and audio guides has now been enhanced by social networking tools. Recent research points to the need of interdisciplinary work at the crossroads of linguistics, media sciences and museum studies to investigate communication strategies and linguistic devices by means of which an international audience of tourists can be addressed and get involved in museums in the digital age. The present paper illustrates the first findings of the project "Museo poliglotta", a project run by two universities in the Italian towns of Bergamo and Brescia in cooperation with local museums with the goal of producing digital multilingual contents for international museum visitors. The empirical part of the paper describes a workshop activity in which students developed Instagram reels in Italian, German and English on the figure of the well-known Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. A number of observations lead to the conclusion that synergies between language research and foreign language teaching on the one hand and museum institutions on the other can bring about important benefits for all parties involved, in particular the possibility to offer professionalising training in the academic world and stimuli to innovate and improve multilingual communication in the museum sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work aims to provide a description of the sociolinguistic and linguistic reality of the hamlet of Timau in the municipality of Paluzza. In contrast to the other villages of the Municipality, the population of Timau has been speaking for centuries, alongside Italian and Friulian, the Timavese code, a Carinthian based variety that nevertheless displays distinctive linguistic characteristics at all levels. In the paper we will present the origins of the village, the sociolinguistic position of Timavese in the community’s repertoire, the similarities and differences between Timavese and Carinthian and the corpus and status planning created for this variety after its recognition by the national law 482/1999 (“Norme in materia di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche”), aimed at protecting the historical linguistic minorities recognized in the national territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to use the framework of intersectionality in linguistic analysis? Is it possible to apply it to Italian linguistics in a fruitful manner? To answer these questions, it is necessary to understand how and when the terms "intersezionalità / intersezionale" entered the Italian lexicon. To elucidate the history of these terms, this article makes use of various corpora comprising written sources in Italian as well as online databases. It contends that, even though the English term "intersectionality" can be traced back to 1989 to the work of Crenshaw, the appearance in the Italian public discourse of the terms "intersezionalità / intersezionale" is quite recent and appears to date back to the early 2000s. The second part of the paper discusses the results of an anonymous questionnaire that aimed to investigate the understanding of "intersezionalità" within the Italian linguistic community. The results of the survey indicate that most Italian linguists who participated in the inquiry are familiar with the terms. The usage of "intersezionalità / intersezionale," however, appears to be mostly used in this context to refer to: i) the intersection of different aspects that characterize social identity (such as ethnic background, gender, age, etc.) without considering the potential implications of discrimination that can result from multiple axes intersecting each other (discrimination by gender, race, ableism, etc.); and ii) the linguistic discrimination and the debate on the feminine inflection expressing inherent and/or grammatical gender. The last part of the paper analyses these results in light of linguistic research conducted in Italy in recent years and seeks to understand how debates around the issue have mainly focused on sex and gender linguistic discrimination. Finally, it will identify potential opportunities where the framework of intersectionality can be applied in Italian linguistics with the help of different sociolinguistic paradigms, such as raciolinguistics, glottophobia, or linguicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new model defined ELFentextualization, devised for the English reformulation of the Italian legal discourse in the field of Migration. It is meant as a pedagogical and practical tool that can help intercultural linguistic mediators increase their competence at the time of analysing and reproducing source texts for an audience of non-native English speakers. In particular, our model is adopted here for the retextualization into English as a 'lingua franca' (ELF) of a number of extracts from the 'Bossi-Fini' law and 'Testo unico sull'immigrazione', which indicate the actions that migrants have to follow to request residence document. After illustrating the theoretical grounds of the ELFentextualization process, this paper will examine the selected corpus of English retextualizations of Italian legal discourse. The comparison between the original and 'ELFentextualized' versions will exemplify that the latter are elaborated after an initial phase of 'text analysis', which is meant to infer the gist of the message. The essential pieces of information are then reconstructed by resorting to lexical and syntactic simplification, as well as to the macrorules for text summarization. Finally, this paper enquires into the initial phases of a reception study of the examined reformulations, which will help discuss the lingua-franca connotation of the English uses in the texts under examination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyses multilingual practices in the primary schools of Bologna (Italy). More specifically, we investigate the linguistic repertoires of a sample of 78 students, as well as their self-assessments of their reading-writing skills. The analysis is based on a questionnaire administered in 11 highly multilingual classrooms, in which at least 60% of the students spoke more than one language. The results show that, on the one hand, Italian is indicated as part of the linguistic repertoire by almost all the interviewees; on the other hand, the majority of the students reported to have high-level reading-writing skills in Italian, regardless of the composition of their linguistic repertoire. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a writing task in Italian that we administered to a sub-sample of students, in order to verify the impact of multilingualism on writing skills through the comparison between the written production of multilingual and monolingual speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish and French are both languages which have a long-standing monocentric linguistic standardization tradition, however they also possess polycentric features, clearly visible - albeit incomplete and largely insufficient - in glottodidactics and related materials. This paper aims to raise awareness of the sociolinguistic dimension in second language teaching, by first providing a thorough theoretical outline surrounding the issue, followed by scale descriptors referring to the introduction of diatopic variations during the second language learning process, with differentiated issues in Spanish an French by considering intrinsic specificities of each language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the authors analyse the correlations between the bilinguals' discourse strategies and the sociolinguistic context of two types of linguistic minority communities: of old and new settlement. The first one concerns the Franco-Provençal context of Faeto and Celle San Vito in Apulia, while the second one deals with the Senegalese migrants' community in Pescara, Abruzzo. The aim of the study is to identify recurrent patterns in discourse that can relate to the presence of specific sociolinguistic variants, which are considered peculiar to the contexts characterizing each of the two minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper endeavour to explore the sociolinguistic charateristics of gaì, a local jargon spoken by some pastoral communities on Italian Alps, untill mid/late XX century. The article first tackles the classification of gaì as a class language, and identifies its affinity with other local and foreign jargons. After a brief description of gaì's main linguistic features, the article proceeds by locating its socio-anthropological roots in the relations between shepherds, farmers and miners. Lastly, the article proposes a non-linguistic research on the origins of gaì, with a focus on the introduction of enclosures in Valcamonica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper will be analyzed some euphemistic substitutes of names of diseases in the Albanian language within the conceptual framework of cognitive linguistics. This analysis is based on data from the history of folkloric traditions of Albania. In many societies, past and present, linguistic censorship is encountered in the physiological field due to psychological, social and cultural causes: in the Albanian linguistic area these linguistic interdiction phenomena have produced a complex network of substitution modules distinguished in formal innovations, involving phonetic, morphological and lexical modifications, and semantic innovations, among which the most frequent are the metonymies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this contribution is to present the long history of linguistic research on Cimbrian, an alloglotte variety of Germanic origin, spoken historically in the mountains of the present provinces of Verona and Vicenza and in southern Trentino, and still used in the municipality of Lusèrn/Luserna. Moreover, the main linguistic features of Cimbrian, in particular the variety of Lusèrn/Luserna, will be presented. Finally, I will discuss some initiatives for the preservation and promotion of the Cimbrian language and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the presence of some linguistic traits considered as characteristic of contemporary Italian in the linguistic production of speakers, by using a survey with informants, and in school grammars, by comparing of textbooks with different approaches. The data from the two analyses are then compared to measure the distance between the social norm and the explicit norm. Results show some oscillation in the evaluation on these traits by the speakers and a persistent gap between implicit norm and explicit norm.

This paper investigates the retention of palatal laterals [ʎ] and the reduction of final unstressed vowels in the Occitan variety of Guardia Piemontese, in Calabria. These features were considered of particular interest because they are still attested in some Piedmontese Occitan varieties. Through the analysis of a linguistic corpus and the methodology of sociolinguistic analysis, the study has a twofold objective: (i) to test whether prolonged contact with the Italo-Romance variety has led to an expansion of linguistic variants in terms of specific phonetic features; (ii) whether and how certain types of realization of a linguistic variable are able to direct linguistic change.

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In Japanese popular media, various associations are made between character types and speech styles, a concept known in Japanese linguistics as “role language”. This study consists of a qualitative analysis of five Japanese translations of Italian works of fiction, carried out by examining the speech style of each character. The aim of this paper is to investigate how language markers associated with the “elderly man” role language category are employed in Japanese translations of foreign works, and how their distribution compares with their use in native Japanese media.

With a focus on the city of Adaama (formerly: Nazret), the biggest urban agglomeration in Oromia Regional State, the paper addresses the “linguistic landscape” which is indicative of the overall sociolinguistic situation of a polity. Language use in the public space has not only practical-instrumental, but also historical, political, juridical, and most of all psycho-sociological dimensions, the latter relating to the symbolic value of written language use. The paper deals with multilingual graphic representations on public commercial and private sign-boards, advertisements, and notices in Adaama city, with an additional focus on the situation on the campus of Adama Science and Technology University. Under the chosen theoretical framework, it analyses language visibility in terms of language legitimisation, both in terms of peoples’ attitudes and based on official documents regarding language status and language use in present-day Ethiopia, such as the Education and Training Policy (1994), the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (1995), the Revised Constitution of Oromia Regional State (2001/2006), and the Higher Education Proclamation (2009). The primary focus of the paper is on the status, functions, and representations of Afan Oromo, including a review of the major historico-political changes affecting this language from Imperial Ethiopa (before 1974), the Därg period (until 1991), and under the new Constitution of the FDRE (since 1995). The paper also deals with linguistic and graphic issues concerning the “orthographic” representations of the four languages used: Afan Oromo, Amharic, Arabic, and English, involving three different graphic systems: Fidäl (Abugida), Arabic, and Roman.

Items of food lexicon, particularly relevant to fruit names, observed in the dialect spoken in Nemi, in the Castelli Romani area, are characterized by survival of the neutral gender. Materials, collected through dialectal inquiries, are analyzed from both etymological and morphological points of view and grouped according to their plural endings: -a, -ora, -i, and -e. A marked vitality is shown by the class of nouns with - a ending in the plural, such as u melu / e mela (eng. 'the apple, the apples'). This morpheme is also found in other sectors of the lexicon and in toponymy. An insight is also given regarding the sociolinguistic use of those forms, that reveals the variable vitality of the dialect among people of different age ranges. This specific type of morphological analysis applied to a specific set of lexical items confirms the picture of extraordinary variety of the Median dialects of Italy, which the dialect of Nemi including those of the Castelli Romani area, belongs to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The revival of ethnic/regional/language minorities within European national states, one of the components of the oppositional ‘identity movements’ of the sixties and seventies, has attracted wide attention from several disciplinary quarters: political science ( e.g. A. Smith,) sociology (A. Touraine), sociology of language (J. Fishman) and others. More recently, it has been linked to the theory of globalization (‘glocalism’). In Italy, for a number of reasons, regional/ethnic issues have long been neglected by ‘mainstream’ sociology, and considered only as a peculiarity of some remote Alpine border areas. However, in 1999, a national bill (n. 482) was passed in the national parliament, recognizing the existence throughout Italy of 12 ‘historical language minorities’ (Albanians, Catalans, Croats, Greeks, Occitans, Franco-Provencals, and others) beside the ones already constitutionally recognized (French, Germans, Slovenes) and granting them some rights, guarantees, and token financial support. By far the largest groups are the Sardinians ( pop. 1.650. and the Friulians (pop. 900.000). After a general-theoretical introduction, the paper briefly sketches the history of ethnic/regional/linguistic/ minority movements in Italy, the history and structure of Law 482/99, and finally focuses on the case of Friuli, where since the early seventies a tradition of sociological studies on these matters have been established, and many empirical surveys have been carried out, making this by far the best researched language minority in Italy. In the conclusion, the results of such research are put in the context of the ‘reversing language shift’ theory advanced by Joshua Fishman, and questions are raised on the possibility to save Friulian, as many hundreds or perhaps thousands other threatened minor languages, by legal decrees, in the face of the powerful socio-economic and cultural forces (nationalisation, globalization ‘homologation’) pushing them toward extinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leo Strauss’ controversial theory of esoteric philosophy, as presented in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), sparked a fierce debate. Opponents and proponents of the theory utilised a wide range of perspectives to support their arguments. By investigating esoteric philosophy from a sociolinguistic perspective, this paper introduces a novel perspective to the Strauss dispute. In PAW Strauss is mistaken regarding esotericism and its role in philosophy. On one hand it is reasonable to endorse Strauss’ persuasive account on the origins of esoteric writing. The Straussian account provides a plausible sociological background as to why philosophy, per se became an esoteric fliedH. On the other hand it seems as Strauss ascribed undue significance to possible clandestine massages that may be found within works of philosophy because philosophy is mostly already done in an esoteric linguistic space.

The subject of this paper is the sociolinguistic aspect of attitudes towards language, included as an unavoidable factor in foreign language learning. The aim of this research is to examine the influence the age of the students or the attitudes of their parents have on attitude formation towards learning a foreign language. The descriptive scientific research method as well as the scaling technique for examining attitudes used on the corpus in this research consisted of students aged 9 and 13 years who attend primary school and learn German as a foreign language. Having in mind that numerous factors contribute to mastering a foreign language, the research will show whether and to what extent the age of the students or the attitudes of their parents affect the formation of students’ attitudes towards learning a foreign language. Research results can contribute to pedagogical practice as well as to restoring existing knowledge about the importance of attitudes in foreign language teaching.

The paper deals with status of Croatian language in official gazettes in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1990 to 2005. Croatian language is one of three official languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina, therefore it is necessary to explore its real position in the society, especially regarding its status. Since those texts are a part of public communication – and usage of standard language in that area is obligatory – attention is focused on one of the most represented public communication style, and that is administrative functional style. For exploring the position of Croatian language in the mentioned period regarding that style, the texts of the following official gazettes were analyzed: Službeni list BiH, Narodni list HZ/RHB and Gradski službeni glasnik Grada Mostara (Službeni list grada Mostara). Collected data were firstly analyzed at the lexical level since the status of language in public communication can be best determined at that linguistic level.

It has been recently suggested that the Argentinian conversational marker che is being replaced by another typical expression, boludo. The purpose of the present paper is to provide a pilot comparative study of these two Argentinian markers in order to examine their free interchangeability and to refute it eventually. A commutation test has been used as a basic tool to compare the behavior and functions of che and boludo and the results have helped to reveal contexts in which it would be inadmissible or inappropriate to employ boludo instead of che due to the possible violation of politeness norms. In the article, che and boludo are considered mainly from the sociolinguistic and pragmatic approaches although some important cultural phenomena are discussed as well.

The linguistic prejudice occurs in differents environments and its dissemination will result more and more in the repetition of the idea that the Brazilian does not know his own language, and he does not use it correctly. This prejudice may be also related to the approach of non standard and the standard norms together in the classroom. Thus, we justify this paper, for it is role of educational institutions to provide the teaching of the Portuguese language free of linguistic prejudice. This present work aims (i) to observe the positive attitudes and the negative one, regarding to the use of linguistic variations and (ii) to demonstrate the necessity of approach the linguistic variation in the educational institutions in order to minimize the incidence of linguistic prejudice among the speakers of the heterogeneous Portuguese language. This research has found that the study of linguistic variation is already actual in the school but it is not enough, considering that students are not always possible to really identify the varieties of fact. Therefore it is necessary a greater care to treat the linguistic peculiarities in order to avoid negative attitudes with this approach, and consequently minimize linguistic prejudice.

In the newspaper sphere, the media’s plan (fact, event, attitude, impact, etc.) is traditionally prepared for perception and processing through a visual channel. A media product in the electronic environment counts with the effect of multicode systems of visual provenance. Journalistic communication, which is electronically determined, respects and utilizes proven and well-established linguistic-compositional and standard typographic patterns and the methods of their printed parallel. At the same time it collaborates with multimedia components at a sociopragmatically effective intersection while using its variations. Consequently, due to the synergetic effect, the linguistic communication dominant features of electronic periodicals might be restructured. The goal of this paper is to outline the levelling-differentiation tendencies of the pillared components, predominantly through the sociolinguistic lens. The findings, statements and outcomes are contrastively discussed in the current electronic press, published in Slavic languages (Slovak, Czech, Croatian, as well as Russian, Belarusian, Serbian and others).

This paper presents part of the problems and difficulties encountered in the elaboration of the first Romanian dictionary of sociolinguistic terminology. The presentation starts with the steps we have taken in accomplishing this work to eventually evoke some of the terminological endeavours imposed by several entries of the dictionary.

The paper deals with the semantic content of three German loan words rocambole, schlass and schnorchel. These three lexical units belong to a set of lexical Germanisms, which have been subjected to a frequency analysis in the French modern written language and then to research as to what extent they are known and used by today´s native speakers. These lexical units evince small shifts of meaning compared with their definitions which appear traditionally in the French monolingual dictionaries.

The article deals with sociolinguistic topic – status of Croatian language in public communication in BiH from 1945 to 1967. Experience has shown that historicity of Croatian language in Bosnia and Herzegovina was more or less denied or at least obfuscated, therefore the Croatian language was denied in language politics of that country. Despite that historicity of Croatian in BiH was preserved by different non-linguistic (pointing out many historical, ethnic, cultural and other particularities) and of course linguistic means. Since the paper deals with position of Croatian language in public communication in Bosnia and Herzegovina and since the standard language is realized through its functional styles, attention is directed to one of the most represented styles in the area of communication – administrative functional style. Texts from the official organs Official Journal NR BiH or Official Journal SR BiH and Official Gazette of Mostar Municipality were analyzed for the needs of research on position of Croatian language in the mentioned period and on that style plan. Collected materials were analyzed at the lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactical level.

Um dos postulados da linguística do início do século XX é o de que o objeto da linguística deveria identificar-se com a parte homogênea dos fenômenos observáveis. Na segunda metade desse século, a sociolinguística representou uma ruptura significativa com o formalismo teórico mediante a introdução do conceito de variável linguística, mas, ao mesmo tempo, dele se aproximou ao adotar o conceito de regra variável. Este trabalho pretende discutir criticamente essa posição encarecendo a necessidade de repropor mais plenamente o falante enquanto agente condutor de seu próprio discurso e, consequentemente, a noção de variável linguística como o espaço privilegiado da construção do significado social da linguagem.One of the postulates of the language of the early twentieth century is that the object of linguistics should be identified with the homogeneous part of the observable phenomena. In the second half of this century, sociolinguistics represented a significant break with the theoretical formalism by introducing the concept of linguistic variable, but at the same time, it got closed do it by adopting the concept of variable rule. This paper aims to discuss this position critically by enhancing the need for re-propose more fully the speaker as an agent driving his own speech and therefore the concept of linguistic variable as the privileged space of the construction of the social significance of language.

Este artigo apresenta uma breve descrição da variante étnica da língua portuguesa falada pelos parkatêjê, a qual, provavelmente, devido à situação de contato entre as duas línguas, têm características de ambas. A interferência dos usos de uma língua na outra pode ser observada nos aspectos fonético-fonológicos, morfossintáticos, lexicais bem como semânticos da variante étnica.This paper presents a brief description about Portuguese variant spoken by Parkatêjê people, which shows characteristics of both languages, probably, because of contact situation between them. The interference of uses of one language in the other can be observed in phonological, morphological, lexical as well semantic aspects of the Portuguese variant spoken by Parkatêjê people.